Let me preface the final part of this series by telling you: the dream in Indo is dead. Or, at the very least, on life support and registering only the faintest pulse.
The dream I set out to chase, that ultimate idyll of surfing: to ride pumping, empty waves alone or with just a couple of mates is mostly a faded memory, surviving mostly in film photos and the stories of old salts at the bar.
Sure, the waves are still there, and always will be.
But that dream has been besmeared by seven other surfers on a set wave at Desert Point. Russian surf school kooks at Uluwatu. A 100 hungry surfers hassling for the wave of their life at G-Land.
You can still buy a little slice of that dream if you can bring yourself to pay $5000USD per night and an extra $100USD per surf session at Nihiwatu.
Or you could do what I’ve done and set off alone on a motorbike, spend three months sleeping on floors and surviving on rice and two packs of durries a day to maybe stumble upon some rare, fickle gem.
It is still out there, that dream, I’ll tell ya. But you have to really, really want it, and be prepared to spend a lot of time waiting and feeling disappointed and alone.
There are many other reasons to explore Indo, though. For the beauty and friendliness of its people. For the cultural diversity, the stories. Tropical warmth and the slow, meandering chaos of life.
Already, I miss all that and I realise just how accustomed I’ve become to it all as the crisp Victorian air slaps me in the face outside the Tullamarine airport, the cri. I lug my board and backpack into the Rideshare queue and order a $120 Uber to my auntie’s place in St Kilda. But when the driver sees my surfboard, he shakes his head.
“No. It will not fit. You need to order a larger car,” he says.
I know it will; I’ve had this board on the side of a motorbike for six months, in the back of little Xenia hatchbacks, and I plead with him, but he is adamant.
“No. It’s not allowed,” he says.
I stash my board at my auntie’s house and the following morning head back to the airport and fly to Sydney for a media awards ceremony. With Giovanna, all scrubbed up on the top floor of the Sydney Convention Centre, I pinch myself to make sure I’m not tripping.
How the hell did I get from chewing betelnut in a beruga in Sumba to this black-tie gala ball? From a diet of Gudang Garams and pop-mie to a five-course degustation with glazed ham terrine and lightly breaded eggplant? Still, the champagne is flowing freely, and it’s enough to cushion the surprise of it all.
Two days later, my mate, Jesse, picks me up from outside the hotel in a dusty Landcruiser ute, tinny hooked on behind. His loud yahoo out of the window draws the attention of Chinese tourists and suits on the sidewalk. He’s on his way home from a fishing trip in Far North Queensland, and together we’re going to squeeze the last dregs of juice out of this six-month surf trip.
Our first surf is in a rising swell at a wobbly, shifting beach break. Magenta thunderheads swell over the ocean, a full moon rising over the dunes. The air is clean and salty, the sand rough and cool. Battling around in the slop, I feel every single one of the cigarettes I have smoked in the past six months. This is no long, lined-up reef pass, and there is no escalator ride up the channel back to the top of perfect waves. But I have my bearings. I’m almost home.
We sit on the bench on the street corner, drinking Coopers Green stubbies and eating Dominoes pizza, the only food still available at 9pm in this country town. The occasional roaring hoon and drunk trickle along the main thoroughfare but is strangely peaceful after the chaos of Indonesia.
We pull up at a free camp in the forest and Jesse throws a couple of swags out of the ute tray, only to realise he has forgotten the blow-up pump for mine. In the morning, torrential rain sets in and we hole out at Jesse’s mum’s house in Batemans Bay. For the past five months, she has been cooking microwave meals on a milk crate and doing the dishes in the laundry sink after an apprentice plumber forgot to connect a pipe and flooded the joint. She is still waiting for the insurance mob to come to the party.
With the ocean a blown-out mess, Jesse and I head to Bunnings. Good old Bunnings, eh. Joint is like a religion in Australia; people don’t go to church for communion on Sundays, they go to Bunnings for paint and sandpaper and a snag. We load the ute with form ply and treated pine, and within a few hours have knocked up a kitchen bench for his mum. When she returns home from a work trip to Canberra, there are tears in her eyes.
“You guys have really made a difference to my life,” she says.
Jesse has a waterlogged 6’0 groveller for me to borrow, but with a swell forecast I hunt around for something else on Facebook Marketplace. I find a 6’4 pintail shooter, with blade sharp rails, flyers and tinted green bottom and hoop pine inlay on the deck.
The seller, Matt, opens the garage roller door for us. He bought this block just behind a national park a couple years ago, he says, he built a little shack on it for him and the missus and kid. He takes a few odd jobs as a chippy, surfing around here mostly on his own. Out back he grows all his own veggies, and he loads us up with a jar of fresh herb for the road.
We meander south, surfing fun little beachies, mushy points, bombies, rock shelves. Walking through national parks and along empty beaches to get to the waves. When we’re not surfing, we spend our time milling in surf car parks, talking with strangers who soon become friends. In Australia’s quiet coastal towns, this is the epicentre of social life, at once the gym, the bar, the cinema, in a place with few other facilities.
We hang in the car park all day and wait for the waves to turn on. In the lineup, the hierarchy is clearly defined. Old boys up the top, no hassling, wait your turn. The consequences of breaching these rules are unspoken. They do not need to be voiced, because everyone observes them. Even though I’m at the back of the queue, the order is a peaceful reprieve from the free-for-all of Indonesia.
Just beyond Moruya, rural becomes remote. Fences disappear, paddocks turn to thick bush. We drive a dirt track through blackened forest, stopping occasionally to drag fallen limbs out of the way. Eventually, we arrive at the 90-acre kiwi fruit farm just outside Bermagui, where Jesse’s grandmother, Noggy, lives alone. At 94-years-old, she still drives a deep-water crossing to get in and out of the property, cooks on a wood-fired pot-belly stove and maintains strong ties with the area’s surviving Aboriginal peoples.
“It’s living like this that keeps me alive,” she says. “I would go bloody mad back in town.”
We camp in the old 16-foot caravan Jesse has set up on top of a hill here: no mobile service, the only power supply a couple of small solar panels charging two 12-volt batteries. We surf a fat, rolling point break, which is freezing even at the onset of summer. When there are no waves we fish for salmon the size of your arm off the rocks, and pry palm-sized abalone from lagoons.
From Cobargo, I take a 12-hour V-Line bus ride back down to Melbourne. Paul Kelly’s From St Kilda to Kings Cross rings in my ears, the big spotted gum country blurring by the rain splattered window.
In Melbourne, my younger brother, Chris, meets me at the Tullamarine airport to join me for the journey home. Chris and I have shared in our struggle with drugs. Of all four siblings, our experience of the family has been the most similar, both of us trying to block out the consequence of its demise with ice. Only Chris hasn’t been afforded the same opportunity I have to break free of it all.
I feel a sense of responsibility for all this. I felt it before as guilt, I feel it now as an understanding, an opportunity. ack then, I was burdened by the bad example I set. Now, I have the ability to set a better one. To show him there is a different, purer way to live and find joy in life.
We head out from the city and collect the four-wheel-drive and boat I have stashed at a mate’s block in a regional town. I left it here after two years of travelling Australia, and after sitting for seven months I’m surprised it still starts and runs. I’m even more surprised I remember how to parallel park.
We make tracks much quicker than anticipated. It’s almost Christmas and we have to get home, but also, after three years on the road I’m exhausted.
People sometimes look at this life and say it’s “living the dream”. And sure, I’m completely free of responsibility and living a total adventure. Maybe I’ll look back at photos one day and remember this as the time of my life, such is the human tendency to memorialise our experiences.
But what people don’t see is the wretched instability. That sinking sense of having everywhere to go but nowhere to call home, aside from the back of a car or the seat of a motorbike. This life is a full-time job, and I’m craving the unique kind of freedom that comes with routine and stability.
The first few days pass without major event. We camp beside mate’s sheds, on empty beaches. I rescue a koala from the road in the Otway National Park, the poor bugger a sitting duck stuck between cliff face and guard rail. We surf an icy reform inside a western Victorian boat harbour, and spend a few days being sandblasted by incessant winds at Cactus, escaping occasionally to empty, sheltered runners in the corner.
At a bush camp 20km off the highway at Eucla, our gas runs out and Chris and I cook on the open fire. We start to argue, on a surface level, because he tips the pasta water out right in the camp. But really, he’s sick of me bossing him around, I’m sick of him not pulling his weight. When I swear at him, he stands over me, fists clenched, challenging me in the violent way that was necessary for his survival in prison. But what good will that serve him out here, I suggest.
“Sit the fuck down. You trying to prove yourself? Prove yourself by being responsible. Not by trying to standover me,” I say.
He keeps going and I snap, launching my deck chair at him, a maelstrom of jerry cans and shovels and firewood quickly following. He lands a good hit on me and I advance, blinding him with my headtorch, and getting a good, cheap shot back. We go to the ground, tussling in black dirt and samphire. It is a real, physical reminder of the terror I feel in returning to Perth, and what awaits me there if I can’t get a grip on myself.
The gearbox blows up just outside Coolgardie, some 500km from home. I think about trying to fix it but it’s 40 degrees and the Friday before Christmas so I call a tow truck, and agree, begrudgingly, to pay my last $3000 to get us home.
The driver, Gary, is the kind of bloke who might actually be a decent man if he put half the level of care into his relationships as he does his vehicle. He tells us about the clutches and window tint and upholstery he has replaced in the 20 years he has owned this old thing. But when we stop at a servo, he screams at me for bringing food and drink into the cab, whinging about some fuckwit who spilled a drink last week.
“No bloody respect. Absolutely none,” he yells. “I have to fucken live in this thing, you know.”
We head on in silence. I call a mate, Levi, who finds a second-hand gearbox on Facebook Marketplace. He drives two hours to pick it up and promises to help me fit it tomorrow. This beautiful country, where practicality is king, you turn a cold shoulder to authority and upstarts, and mates will always pay back a good turn.
On the outskirts of the city, Gary drops us in a car park beside my mate, Joey’s workshop. Joey lends me another vehicle for the night and we drive through the suburbs, all bruised and dusty and broken. Finally, we turn into mum’s driveway. By some kind of Christmas miracle, we’ve made it. It’s the end of this road, the beginning of another. Only this time, there are no white lines or Google Maps to guide the way.
